It's been a long time in the making, but this morning I did the first successful flight in the Pietenpol Air Camper my dad started when I was one year old. Real consistent work didn't start until I was in high school and we began doing EAA SportAir workshops together but a total of 22 years and thousands of hours of work later, it flew great! So much fun, this was my first time doing any test flying. My only experience flying in a Piet was a short passenger ride in Brodhead a few years ago. First some pics and a video, then a little more story below:
It flew really well, only needs an oil change and a few minor tweaks before the next flight. I did some orbits above the traffic pattern at KLMO to feel out the controls, and to my surprise I pretty quickly accelerated to 90 mph indicated in level flight, in a Pietenpol! Keep in mind this is indicated airspeed, accuracy testing will come later. Most of the flight was at full throttle because we are trying to break in the new engine. There is an MGL engine monitor in the panel so I was able to monitor temps, we have 4 point CHT right now and all looked good with one rear cylinder getting a little hot but nothing alarming. I also did one approach to stall, not a stall, but it felt very stable and retained control authority down to 25 mph indicated before I gave it some throttle. I have a feeling there is some error introduced by the relatively short pitot on the LE. Next, I descended down into the pattern and did one low approach to get a feeling for the sight picture and then once more around the pattern to a nice full stall landing! My biggest problem was barely being able to hear anything over the radio due to the feedback from my own mic in the air. I already have a solution involving a 35mm film canister and some foam to try and sort that out.
If you noticed above that I stated this was the first successful flight, that's because my dad did fly this plane two summers ago for a total of two minutes before making an off-field landing due to an ignition issue on the Corvair engine we had. Unfortunately the corn field was not cooperative with his forced landing and the Piet ended up upside down after ripping off the landing gear. This restarted the building phase, but my dad took it as an opportunity to make improvements he had been thinking of (is any project really ever done??). It took a couple years but the Piet ended up with a newly rebuilt O-200-D built by Bob Barrows and a lower empty weight of ~710 lbs.
What a great summer so far! I have a few more weeks in CO before heading to OSH so plenty of time for more flying adventures in both planes
Edit: Updated image for higher quality
